Indexering av skönlitteratur en empirisk kvalitativ studie av indexering och språk
The aim of this essay is to investigate how patrons, librarians and indexers use subject headings to describe and index fiction literature. We wanted to know if the groups concentrated on different levels in the text from a semiotic viewpoint, where words either can describe the manifest/connotative meaning or the latent/denotative. To investigate this we had four fiction indexers, four librarians working with fiction for adults and eight library users read and index four short stories. After that we did interviews asking them about how they were thinking when describing the texts, how they use subject headings, about their opinions on indexing and, in the interviews with the librarians and indexers, about their usual work assignments. The subject headings they listed were analysed according to the level they described. The results showed that it was a big difference between the groups; 29% of the patrons subject headings were on the manifest level and 59 % on the latent level. 66% of the librarians and indexers subject headings were on the manifest level and 23 % on the latent level. This brings us to the question of who the indexers are indexing for, the librarians or the patrons?